Jackson Mac Low’s Complete Light Poems appear exactly ten years after the poet’s death. The first 22 Light Poems were published by Black Sparrow Press in 1968.In the ensuing 20 years, Jackson wrote 38 more Light Poems, ending with the “60th Light Poem: In Memoriam Robert Duncan, 8–9 October 1988.” The Light Poems, begun in 1962, are unique to Mac Low’s body of work in that they were written intermittently, over a period of 26 years.I have often wondered where self-referential writing ends and objective observation begins. Endearingly, Mac Low continually invites us into the time and place of his writing. We are, as it were, being let in from the cold: “Just me & the cats & and the plants I just took a shower it’s not quite 100 degrees here.”

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Susan Thackrey, a poet who lives and works in San Francisco, began to compose poetry at the age of three. She was an inaugurating student in the Poetics Program at New College in San Francisco in 1980, and studied with Robert Duncan and Diane di Prima formally and informally over a number of years. Thackrey has given invitational lectures on Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and George Oppen, including as a keynote speaker at the George Oppen Conference in Buffalo, and most recently on Duncan’s The H.D. Book for the San Francisco Poetry Center. Since reading Homer in Greek over a five year period with Robert Duncan and some of her poet contemporaries, an important and lively part of her life in poetry has almost always included variously focused and long-lived reading groups with other poets.

Her day jobs have included co-founding and managing the art gallery Thackrey and Robertson in San Francisco, as well as her current work as a Jungian analyst in the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. There she has taught, spoken, and published, focusing especially on art, recently publishing a talk and essay on Jung’s paintings for The Red Book: Reflections on C.G. Jung’s Liber Novus (Routledge).

Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Five Fingers, Hambone, Talisman, Traverse, and Volt. Current books in print, in addition to Andalusia, are Empty Gate (Listening Chamber), and George Oppen: A Radical Practice (O Books and The San Francisco Poetry Center).

“Will Alexander's poetic universe could be a 1 + 1000 surface ('folded-in expanse') imbedded in a 1 + 1000 + X dimensional Historical Space-Time (the 'transverse'), with Ancient-Future Language particles and ?elds trapped on the folded-in expanse while Non-Institutional Unrepressed Images (NIUI's) are free to access the transverse. At least one of Alexander's extra spatial dimensions could be very large (cosmic proportional) relative to the Standard Global Media Scale of Capitalist Misapprehension of 'personhood,' which lowers the Fundamental Human Individual's Volitional Scale, possibly even down to Trans-Sub-Cultural Electroweak Level. This revolutionary picture arises in the framework of recent developments in Über-Performativity in Contemporary Poetics ® as regards Spontaneous Mass Bubble Nucleation of Language as possible New Life Form Generation (NLFG's). Generalized Over-Accumulated-Wealth SuckBot Aesthetics cannot describe Present Ever-Dying Noxious Cultures at high enough energies and so must be replaced by an Alexanderized PolyPerson Theory of Drama, picking up significant corrections as the Fundamental Ideological Corpus Energy Scale is approached. Thus, at high energies Infra-Continental Cultural Relevance 'leaks' into the transverse, behaving in a truly higher-dimensional way.”—Rodrigo Toscano

Born in 1948, Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, visual artist and pianist. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. He was also the subject of a colloquium published in the prestigious African American cultural journal Callaloo in 1999. Author of 20 books (including MIRACH SPEAKS TO HIS GRAMMATICAL TRANSPARENTS, INSIDE THE EARTHQUAKE PALACE: 4 PLAYS, ABOVE THE HUMAN NERVE DOMAIN, COMPRESSION & PURITY, EXOBIOLOGY AS GODDESS, and TOWARDS THE PRIMEVAL LIGHTNING FIELD), Alexander has taught at various colleges including University of California, San Diego, New College (San Francisco, CA), Hofstra University, and Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in addition to being associated with the nonprofit organization Theatre of Hearts/Youth First, serving at-risk youth. He is a lifelong resident of Los Angeles.

“As if we are hearing but instead are given the sound of the unheard and unsaid: Gutteral negations. As if Baron bypasses speech and instead dishes us up an account of the breath beneath the everyday that resists musicality—and evokes in that resistance its own halting stuttering rhythm broken by rhythm in the middle of a beat. Just as out of the wind / the branches / make it / live, that which exists under the spoken and heard is made to live in the music of these compelling anti-songs: lines lit in containers.”—Susan Gevirtz

Todd Baron received his MA under Louis Patler, Robert Duncan, and Diane Di Prima. Graduating in 1989, he has written and published eight titles of poetry. He published ReMAP magazine for five years, a postgraduate poetics journal based on the teachings/readings of New College: a continuation of the program's ideas. He has taught at the Otis Art Institute and currently teaches language arts at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, CA.

Jessica Smith, Founding Editor of Foursquare and name magazines and Coven Press, serves as the Librarian for Indian Springs School, where she curates the Indian Springs School Visiting Writers Series. A native of Birmingham, Alabama, she received her B.A. in English and Comparative Literature: Language Theory, M.A. in Comparative Literature, and M.L.S. from SUNY Buffalo, where she participated in the Poetics Program. She is the author of numerous chapbooks including Trauma Mouth (Dusie 2015) and two full-length books of poetry, Organic Furniture Cellar (Outside Voices 2006) and Life-List (Chax 2015).

Life-List is a meditation on memory, love, and grief organized through the language of birding. From a fluttering first kiss to the frantic flapping of the last captive passenger pigeon on Earth looking for her mate, Life-List explores the relation of the individual to her incessantly disappearing habitat.

“we have lost something in the translation / of time into language,” Jessica Smith writes in this lovely book of experimental poems, Life-List. But breaking open the words, she enables “that which would kill you” to burst into flowers, creating the space—of breath, of spirit, of imagination—to let the birds in this book of birds fly through. Ann Fisher-Wirth

Dinosaurs did not go extinct. Approximately 10,000 extant species of birds appear to be descended from a subgroup of theropods, a heritage that includes our childhood idol T Rex as well as the bee hummingbird. Birders know the richness of heeding their presence & variety, the divination of alectryomancy, the creation of life-lists. Any reader who heeds the n apart from hero in heron will recognize how birds articulate space & vice versa, how a life looking outward can be invested with our deepest interiors. The Brain, a very smart woman once wrote, is wider than the sky. Ron Silliman

CHAX

CHAX publishes soft-bound offset books as well as hand-printed limited editions that expand the art of the book. We also curate readings and other events to benefit the local and global community of writers and readers.